HG-PX4 Example Lab 4: Loading and Running Code
Uploading firmware to the board
You're probably wondering "now how do I upload this new firmware to my board"? There are a couple of ways. We will use the easiest method, using the on board bootloader and QGroundControl. Note: This assumes your FMU already has a bootloader loaded from the section Programming FMUK66 for first use. Assuming that the bootloader is already in place, loading code is a simple process, so lets go over that next.
Preparing the FMU
Start with the FMUK66 powered off, and disconnected from USB on your computer. Run QGroundControl and navigate to the Firmware tab as shown below:
Bootloader settings for custom firmware
Once you've navigated to this screen, follow the instructions and plug the FMU into your computer using the provided microUSB cable. You should see a prompt asking you which firmware you want to upload.
You'll want to check the "Advanced settings" box and select "Custom firmware file..." from the dropdown box as shown in the image below. Click OK at the top right to go to the next step.
Selecting your .px4 file and flashing
Once you click OK, a dialog to select your file will appear. You'll need to navigate to your PX4 firmware directory and go to Firmware/build/nxp_fmuk66-v3_default/. Inside that folder you'll find an nxp_fmuk66-v3_default.px4 file. Select this file to upload the firmware to your board.
Note that this directory and filename depends on the target board you are building for.
If the firmware upgrade successfully finished, you should see a message in the log that says "Upgrade complete." in yellow. If you didn't get that message, try again, check to see that the code did in fact complete compiling without errors.
Assuming you did get the "Upgrade complete." message, then you can continue in this lab guide!
Running our custom PX4 application
Now that we have built our PX4 application into the firmware, and loaded it onto the FMU hardware, it's time to run it. After flashing your FMU it is recommended to hard reset or power-cycle the board. Wait for QGroundControl to reconnect with your board over USB, and then open up the Mavlink console as shown below.
The console
The terminal shell or console gives you command line access to the software running on the FMU.
It should be noted that the console is actually available through several interfaces. A hardware "root console" is available when using the FMU debugger interface connected to a FTDI-USB-UART cable. This exposes a serial UART directly on the FMU itself. The root console is particularly helpful since it is initialized on power-up and can specifically show what is happening immediately on power-up, before something like the the USB interface is initialized and working.
Note: Since the FTDI-USB-UART cable is a hardware solution that converts the FMU debugger UART interface to USB it doesn't require any FMU software. This is different than the FMU USB port itself - which makes use of a PX4 software driver in order to function.
A console is also available through a direct USB connection or over a telemetry radio to a program such as QGroundControl. (and there are even other methods, such as SSH over an Ethernet connection). With any of these connections you can run PX4/NuttX commands in the Mavlink console. To see a list of commands you can run, type "?" into the console input field.
Finding your new LAB3 hg_led program
With any of these connections discussed above you can run PX4/NuttX commands in the console program. In QGroundControl this is known as the Mavlink Console. As with other operating systems such as Linux, commands are actually just programs that can be run on the command line or called from other programs or scripts. To see a list of PX4 commands you can run, type "?" into the console input field.
Running your program
At the top left, you can see our new program, hg_led! Go ahead and run it by typing its name in the console and pressing <enter> to see your hg_led program in action!
The main multicolor LED is the one we are controlling in the program, the other red and orange LEDs are other indicators. Fun! Next, we will go over a more advanced example and you can try coding it yourself!
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